A few weeks ago the “collective” (Jen, Seth, and myself) took advantage of one of Gamestop’s extra trade-in bonus weekends to clear out some old games and pick up a brand new Xbox 360 for a very, very cheap price. And so far we love it.

Of course the picture being painted here is far too rosy, so of course a problem must enter into it somewhere. That somewhere is the recently announced price cut for all 360 models.

When we picked up our 360 we got the $299 Pro model which came with a 20GB hard drive. The only difference post-price cut is the hard drive, a 60GB drive instead of my 20GB drive.

So I contact Microsoft, and all they tell me is “You can return your entire 360 to the retailer where you purchased it.” So I call Gamestop, and they tell me “You can’t return the entire unit, but we will give you a credit for the difference between the 20GB model and the 60GB model.” After the price drop they still had 20GB models in stock, so they dropped them down to $260.

The long and the short of this story, so far, is the best I can get is a ~$39 credit. You may be thinking I could use said $40 to purchase a new drive for the 360. Guess what Gamestop charges for a refurbished 20GB drive like the one I already have? $60. A $40 credit won’t even cover a brand new game entirely.

So yeah, I feel slightly ripped off. If I had waited another three weeks to buy my 360 this would not be an issue at all.

I’ve asked the contact who replied to me from Xbox support to escalate this matter to a supervisor or manager for further review, since their scripted first level support responses obviously aren’t geared to handle this type of request. We’ll see what happens.

Update: I never heard back from a supervisor or manager type, and I ended up just taking the contract before the time limit expired. I got a couple used games out of it, so at least that’s something.

In regards to Mr. X’s comment about the PS3: Yes, it’s a nice shiny piece of hardware, but it’s still too expensive for my tastes and the lack of backwards compatibility on the more recent models bugs me. In a year or two there will be a nice, large used game selection and the console itself will be more affordable. These are the same conditions under which we bought our Gamecube, PS2, and 360.